Sustainable Wine

One would have thought it was impossible to pay too much for food. Life, after all, is not the same without it. Yet all over the developed world, farmers are hard up. The English newspapers made hay some weeks ago with a story about farmers’ wives in the Hardy Country, one of the most picture-postcard parts of Britain, who are obliged to advertise their charms on the Internet for the enjoyment of foreign tourists (“Come and Pluck an English Rose”) in order—if you will permit the expression—to make ends meet.

Government subsidies, meant to solve the conundrum of keeping food cheap without making farmers impossibly poorer than their fellow countrymen, do nothing for Third World farmers, who are thus excluded from markets. Farm subsidies are not, in the final analysis, for the long-suffering farmer; they are for eaters who would rather spend money on something else. God alone knows the solution to this—how many economists does it take to change a lightbulb?

But one can hardly hold up for admiration the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union (or whatever the Common Market is being called this week), even though more than forty-six percent of the official expenditure of the European Union goes toward agriculture. The Common Market started as a deal by which German industry paid for the picturesque traditions of French farming. They put the European Parliament at Strasbourg in Alsace to symbolize this concord. Whatever the symbolism, the practicalities are truly remarkable. For one week each month, the 626 members, their staff (who otherwise work in Brussels), their secretariat (based in Luxembourg), and their translators (into and out of eleven official languages) decamp to Alsace. Imagine moving the Minnesota Legislature up to Duluth one week in four, all the year round.

Strasbourg is certainly central to Old Europe. Caught between the river Rhine in Germany and the Vosges Mountains in France, it enjoys a relatively dry and continental climate. It has been fought over by armies from East and West at least since the neo-pagan Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate defeated a Germanic confederation there in 357. After the war of 1870, Alsace became German (Elsass); in 1918 it became French once again. Hence the old joke about Alsace wine being made of German grapes using French methods—which means they do, or do not, wash their feet (adjust joke according to prejudice).

It is true that many of the Alsace grape varieties, such as riesling and sylvaner, are also widely grown in Germany. Alsace is in fact the only part of France producing first-rate wine where the grape variety rather than the region is the most prominent item on a wine label. The grape most readily associated with Alsace is the gewürztraminer, a variety actually related to muscat grapes and made into wine with a strong smell of elderflowers, melons, or lychees (pick your own comparison), tasting remarkably like its own fresh grapes.

As in Germany, some growers leave the best grapes on the vines until they grow the “noble rot” and are made into sweeter wines labeled “Vendange Tardive” (German Spätlese). But most Alsace gewürztraminer is made into table wine, clean, dry and spicy, fermented in steel rather than in oak, until all the residual sugar has been absorbed and the wine has a fresh bright finish. This is perhaps the only wine that can stand up to curry.

It is certainly good with turkey. As it costs a fraction of what you would pay for the fine wines of Burgundy, the wine region closest to the southwest of Alsace, you might want to stock up on it in anticipation of Thanksgiving. I would not answer for its compatibility with marshmallow dip or lime jelly. So buy a bottle now and practice.